“Lie back and think of mutantkind,” I said.

  Tempus made a ppffft sound. Triage sighed, but wouldn’t let me tweak him. Too bad. I was looking for something – anything – else to think about other than the machines whirring to life around me.

  As Triage had promised, the hatch remained open. I could look toward my feet and see him out there, fiddling with the equipment.

  Silence from outside for a while. Then Triage and Tempus muttering together, at the corner of the room. That made me nervous. Next time I tried getting a rise out of them, they ignored me.

  I hate feeling like I’m trapped. The weird thing was, I never was claustrophobic as a kid. I didn’t mind crawling in and out of the rocky pits and crevices around my father’s ranch. Now there may have been a teensy bit of post-traumatic stress response. A lot of that stemmed from the time I came to the X-Mansion as a refugee.

  The claustrophobia hadn’t just come from the high walls and the guards. It was everything that happened afterward. After we busted out, we had to go on the run. (Neena was with us; in fact, she’d led the escape. But this was before we’d formally teamed up.) All told, about a hundred or so mutants had busted out of the walls the government had put up around the X-Mansion. Escaping landed us in a whole heap of other trouble. She’d found us a place in the Nevada desert to hide: an old weapons bunker, locked away under virtually unbreakable heavy doors. Since we thought we could control the doors, it seemed like the perfect place to hole up.

  While Neena is the luckiest person I know, she can’t actually control her luck… and her luck doesn’t look out for anyone but her. And, as it happened, she’d led us into a trap.

  I’ve met a lot of mutant-hating humans in my time. There’s little more soul-scarring, though, than a mutant-hating mutant. One of the refugees that had come along with us, a New York kid named Johnny Dee, hated who he was.

  To the very, very little extent I’m willing to be fair to him, his abilities weren’t the easiest to live with. His X-gene had “expressed itself,” as Triage would say, in the form of another living organism growing out of his chest like a conjoined twin. It was an ugly, pitiful little thing. A big toothy maw with grasping tentacles but no functioning brain – at least not that anybody had managed to figure out. It had a talent nearly as repulsive as it was: feed a piece of a person’s DNA in that maw, and, in a little bit, it would spit out an egg that contained a palm-sized doll of that person. A cute little puppet.

  Johnny Dee could take that puppet and use it to seize control of that person. Even hurt them, from a distance. The puppet was the person, in a real significant sense. Break the puppet, and the real person’s bones would snap, too.

  He hated the mutant part of himself. He thought he could scoop it out, like all that made him different could be changed with surgery. He’d fallen under the thrall of human supremacists. And willingly let himself be used by them.

  Johnny Dee had manipulated things to send us to that bunker. He’d sealed us in. There were still bombs stored in that bunker, and he’d set them to detonate. He’d used his puppeteering power to turn us against each other.

  One of the people Johnny Dee took control of was me. I’d pointed a gun at the head of my future-best-friend, Neena, and had to get the stuffing kicked out of me just to get him out of my body. I’d been aware of it as it happened. My body being snapped out of my control was the worst thing I’d ever felt.

  It gave me a whole bunch of issues I would’ve liked to resolve with some cathartic violence, but I never had the chance. Johnny Dee was taken down a thousand miles away from me, in Washington DC, by the same bureaucrats who tried to pen us into the X-Mansion. They put him in prison. Outside of a couple glimpses of Johnny Dee when we were both at that refugee camp, I never saw him.⁸

  8 Outlaw never quite got over the events of the X-Men: Civil War miniseries, outlined here. –Ed.

  Ever since, whenever I was stuck in tight spaces, I couldn’t stop thinking about those bunker walls, about the doomsday weapons ticking away behind them. It made me feel like I was losing control of myself.

  Heck, just coming anywhere associated with the X-Men had me thinking too much about it.

  Unresolved issues are a mandatory part of this business. You deal with them as you can.

  It seemed like a small eternity before Triage said, “Time to come out.”

  As soon as I could be, I was on my feet, donning my hat. I was glad there were no mirrors in the room, but I didn’t need one to know that I was pale and sweaty.

  The last thing I wanted to see coming out, though, was Triage looking just as pale as I felt. He and Tempus were hunched over a laptop. They didn’t look at me.

  The room felt three times as large as it had been as I walked over to them.

  I needed a moment to make sure my voice would be even. “Hit me with it,” I said.

  “We’re not seeing anything wrong with your muscles,” Tempus said, which relieved me more than I wanted to show. “It’s always hard to tell what’s normal with mutants, but there doesn’t seem to be any kind of degeneration. It just looks like you’ve been using them hard.”

  “OK,” I said. “So that’s the good news. What are you hiding?”

  “That I’m going to need to get back into my neurology texts,” Triage said.

  “Sweet Celestials,” I said, taking off my hat. I needed to hide my face. Couldn’t let them see me biting my lip.

  This was how my dad had died. Early-onset Alzheimer’s, complicated by congestive heart failure that meant less and less oxygen was reaching his brain. When he was still capable of understanding what was happening, he used to tell me that he could keep the neurology department of a university busy for years.

  Watching him go had been the worst thing in my life. Just being here was sending me lurching from one bad memory to another.

  Triage’s mouth dropped open, as if he had only just realized how I had interpreted what he said. “I don’t necessarily mean that there’s a problem… just something unusual–”

  “Textbooks aren’t going to tell you anything, anyway,” Tempus said. “This is mutant territory. Or at least metahuman stuff.”

  “Do you have any telepathic ability?” Triage asked.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s all right if you do,” Triage said. “You can tell us and it won’t leave the room. Doctor-patient confidentiality. We understand that plenty of mutants want to, or need to, keep their abilities concealed.”

  It took me a moment to process what he was saying. “I’ve never had any ‘telepathic abilities,’” I said slowly, as if I was speaking to an idiot. “Nor would I want any.”

  Tempus beckoned me over to their side of the laptop. “Take a look at what we’re seeing.”

  I put my hat back on, and did as she asked. Not that it helped. All I saw on their screen was a false-color image of a brain. Mine, presumably. Different sections glowed in pixelated neon.

  It all just looked like meat to me. Triage pointed to different neon sections as though it should mean something. “Most human brains only have a few states that they cycle between. For sleep, for activity, for meditation, et cetera. This pattern doesn’t match any of those. There’s a lot of additional activity around the sensory cortex and parietal lobes. Those are the places where you perceive and make sense of the world. All correlated with telepathy. If your brain is working like this a lot, it’s no wonder you haven’t had good sleep. I’m betting that, if we did a few more tests, we’d find neurotransmitter levels off the charts, and a whole bunch of other things that would keep you from sleeping, too.”

  They looked at me like they were expecting me to do the whole English, please, doctor bit. “You’re talking about big chunks of the human brain,” I said. “‘Parietal lobe’ covers a hell of a lot. What, specifically, was looking weird?”

  Triage blinked. But he covered his surprise gracefully. “That’s just the thing. It’s not localized anywhere. It’s just… all over, in that region. Increased blood flow, increased electrochemical activity. There are no abnormalities in its structure, just in its activity. How you’re using it, so to speak.”

  “It could be that you’re developing new abilities,” Triage said. “You wouldn’t be the first mutant to do that late in life.”

  “It’s not late in my life,” I muttered.

  “Or this could indicate an ability you’ve had all along and never had the mental vocabulary, so to speak, to realize that you’ve had it. It would be like seeing a color that nobody else does. If you grew up seeing it, and nobody else talked about it or gave you a reason to, you’d get used to it pretty quickly. It would become background noise.”

  “Pretty sure it’s hard to mistake reading somebody’s mind for seeing a color,” I said.

  “It’s just an example,” he told me. “And telepathy doesn’t always mean reading somebody’s mind.”

  “It can be subtle,” Tempus said. “Magik says it can be like plucking an emotion out of the air. Or getting an image, a smell or a taste, from somebody’s memory without meaning to.”

  “I don’t care what it is,” I said. “It’s ruining my life and I want it to stop. Can’t you just make it go away?”

  “If this is a mutant ability you’re developing, I’d have real ethical problems with removing–”

  “I don’t,” I interrupted. “It’s not an ‘ability’ if it’s keeping me from doing my job.”

  Triage looked like he was about to argue some more, but Tempus set a hand on his shoulder. “I’m starting to think it’s time we called our instructors in on this,” she said. “Even more, I’m thinking this isn’t a good question for medical science.”

  He pondered that and, after a moment, nodded. I looked back and forth between them.

  “What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

  •••

  From science to sorcery, all in the space of a few hours. This life will give you whiplash in more ways than one. The doctors were sending me to see an honest-to-God wizard.

  I’d never met Magik before. Heard a lot about her, though. I was a little surprised to find her in charge of a place like the New Charles Xavier Institute. She seemed like she’d have too much going on in her own life to become a teacher. But some of Neena’s other friends had teaching gigs, too, and they seemed like they were doing a good job of balancing their professional lives with their protecting-all-mutantkind lives.

  Magik’s office looked deceptively normal. Fluorescent lights, filing cabinets, bookshelves. Professionally beige. It was in the details that things started to get weird. There were thin, charred circles burnt into the carpet. They were all about the same size, but in different places. Most were concentrated around the desk. One of the walls had a smeared chalk outline of something that looked like a summoning circle. On the wall behind me, several swords were mounted in brackets. A dark stain had worn into the edge of her desk. It could’ve been ketchup, or soy sauce, or blood. As if to prove that she wasn’t entirely otherworldly, a hamster cage sat on one of the far bookshelves.

  Magik herself sat behind the desk, chattering on a smartphone. Honestly, I didn’t know why my outfit got so much attention when people like her were also walking around. Her midriff must not have gotten all that cold, is all I’m saying. She had hair longer than my own, and blue-gray eyes that gave me goosebumps to meet. It was easier to keep studying the bookshelves than meet her gaze.

  The books on the shelves weren’t anything like what I’d expected to find in a school. She had books about medieval and Renaissance swordfighting techniques. Books labeled Lost Arcana of the Queens of the Mongol Khanate. Artifacts of the Atlantean-Lemurian Wars. Nine Known Times the World Ended (And How It Got Better). The Anatomy and Alchemical Uses of the Common Hamster. And a whole bunch of others with blank spines, or whose spines were marked in lost languages or in glyphs.

  I eyed the hamster cage on the cabinet uneasily. It was empty.

  “So,” Magik said, pocketing her smartphone with a dramatic flourish and steepling her fingers on her desk. “You’re troubled by telepathy and want to get rid of it.”

  “How’d you know that?” I asked. I’d had my eye on Triage and Tempus throughout our walk here. They hadn’t spoken with anybody.

  Magik smiled.

  Damn magicians. Everything’s got to be a stage show, even when the magic is real. I folded my arms.

  “I don’t mean to be off-putting–” she started.

  “Yes, you do,” I interrupted.

  “Don’t make her mad,” Triage whispered. He sounded even more uneasy than before, and I’d made him pretty darn uneasy.

  “I’ll take a look,” Magik said. “Stand very still.”

  I did exactly the opposite. I backed up against the door, with Tempus and Triage on either side of me. “I’m not having anybody read my mind,” I told her.

  “It’s difficult for me to gauge your telepathic problems if I don’t,” she said.

  “I don’t care. Find another way.”

  “All right, then.” I didn’t like the way she smiled when she said that. Tempus and Triage, I noticed, were shifting away from me.

  Magik stood up from behind her desk and walked over to me. She reached out, set her hand lightly on my shoulder, and walked a circle around me. I held my ground.

  “You’re going to want to hold very still, though,” she said.

  All at once, we were someplace else.

  A sudden sharp, red-yellow light drove daggers into my eyes. It was more the heat than the light, though, that made me squeeze my eyes shut. Great big waves of heat washed over us, so hot that they made me shiver, like my nervous system had overloaded. There wasn’t much pain, not yet, but it wouldn’t be long in coming. The smell registered first. Sulfurous, choking smoke and ash combined with stink and sweat like we’d been clenched inside Satan’s armpit.

  My ears popped. In the second before I’d shut my eyes, I’d caught a glimpse of terrible black mountains, pressed tight against a sky shaded somewhere between blood and charcoal. It was hard to tell which parts of the ground were magma and which were rocks so hot that they glowed. Somewhere, high atop one of the sizzling escarpments, I thought I saw eyes.

  I flinched, but Magik’s touch on my shoulder had become a grip, keeping me from stumbling away. Good thing, too. Even with my eyes closed, I heard hissing behind me, like bacon on a fryer.

  “My powers on Earth are limited,” Magik explained. “If I was going to use more subtle, complex magic – to keep from ‘reading your mind’ – I needed to take you to a plane where I’m a little more comfortable.”

  “Yeah, I get it. You’re a showoff.”

  “I really am.”

  Her other hand found my right temple and pressed lightly against it. Her touch tingled. I braced myself for… I don’t know what, really. My mind being invaded. But all I felt was the uncomfortable kind of shiver I got when anyone held their hand to my skin for that long.

  The heat around us was so intense it was difficult to interpret as heat. I thought of the first time I’d gotten into a hot tub as a kid, and the way my body had been so unprepared for something so hot that I’d started to get chills.

  “Oh,” Magik said, as if annoyed. And then surprised: “Oh, my…”

  “Care to enlighten me?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level.

  “You’ve definitely been telepathically active,” she said. “Or activated. A region of your brain is being used in ways that it never has been before. I think Triage was onto something. You may be developing a new ability.”

  “I don’t want a new ability. I just want to be able to do my job. Make it stop.”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me when I said, ‘it’s a region of your brain.’ It’s not something you can turn off in any way short of a lobotomy. You may need to learn how to live with this.”

  “I don’t need a talking to or platitudes,” I said. “I need my life back.”

  Magik was silent for a moment. I wondered if what I said had gotten through, or if she’d become distracted by something else. I didn’t want to open my eyes. Half of me wanted to shove away from her. The other half wanted to cling tight, in case she got it into her mind to strand me in Hell.

  The tingling spread deeper into my temple. It started to hurt like needles. I hated that. Especially because, as the other two might have thought me too simple to know, I knew the human brain didn’t have pain receptors.

  And then it was over. In a whoosh of hot air mushrooming up from us, Magik and I were back in her office. My ears popped again. Triage and Tempus were coughing up all the ash-tainted air we’d brought with us.

  “You want to give us a warning the next time you go dimension-hopping?” Tempus asked.

  “No,” Magik said, returning to her desk.

  I brushed soot off my arm. And then I noticed it. There was a feeling of lightness in my head, right around where it had hurt. I felt – I don’t know how else to put this – I felt unburdened. Like an ox finally unhitched from a plow. Lighter in a way that I couldn’t explain, but in a way that was nonetheless a very material sensation.

  “I put up a psionic barrier,” Magik said, “around your active telepathic centers. You were reaching out. Trying to draw a connection with someplace else. It’s no wonder you’re tired all the time. A telepathic experience that active… would be like trying to fall asleep while you’re pedaling on an exercise bike. Telepathy might not look very draining, not physically, but it takes a lot of energy.”

  I let a breath out. “So long as that’s over–”

  “The barrier isn’t permanent,” Magik said.

  “You could’ve at least given me a minute before deflating my balloon,” I said.

  “I can’t make a permanent psionic barrier that won’t harm you in the long-term. But I can block the impulses for a little while. What you have right now should last… oh, I don’t know, three to four days. I can’t be precise when I’m dealing with a wild talent like yours.”

  “Does that mean I have to come back to you to have it renewed? That often?”